"First, the subpoena requested "[a]ll URL's that are available to be
located to a query on your company's search engine as of July 31,
2005." [...] In negotiations with Google, this request was later
narrowed to a "multi-stage random" sampling of one million URLs in
Google's indexed database. As represented to the Court at oral
argument, the Government now seeks only 50,000 URLs from Google's
search index. Second, the government also initially sought "[a]ll
queries that have been entered on your company's search engine
between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005 inclusive." (Subpoena at 4.)
Following further negotiations with Google, the Government narrowed
this request to all queries that have been entered on the Google
search engine during a one-week period. During the course of the
present Miscellaneous Action, the Government further restricted the
scope of its request, and now represents that it only requires 5,000
entries from Google's query log in order to meet its discovery
needs. Despite these modifications in the scope of the subpoena,
Google maintained its objection to the Government's requests."

2) The information was being sought for a statistical study, and the
data would be under a protective order, and not intended to identify
any particular person (even if some identification would in theory be
possible, nobody was going to try to do it). In contrast, the
information being sought here is to identify and hopefully convict
specificpeople of criminal charges.

Of course, Google is in a tough position here, some of the crimes
alleged are very serious. This IS the sort of problematic action
that people projected onto the DOJ's relatively insignificant
study. But it's quite an odious spin to trivialize it as "small and
narrow"!